Just a Minute...
Ensuring that any actions to be taken are recorded accurately is half the battle. The other half of course includes monitoring and reviewing the carrying out of those tasks.
Many meetings have an agenda that starts with "Apologies" and then goes on with "Minutes of Last Meeting" and "Matters Arising". However, if minutes are to be useful, then they should be produced and circulated within a short period of time - preferably by the next day for a weekly meeting and within a week for any other period.
If this is not the case then meeting attendees are forced to write their own notes, which detracts from their attention and ability to take part in the meeting itself. There are very few people capable of both minuting and participating in a meeting. Not only do attendees end up with sketchy (if any) notes from the meeting, but the official minutes if produced weeks or months afterwards, may misrepresent in either a small or (occasionally) large way, the detail of events which cannot be remembered. This usually manifests itself in a bland, meaningless lack of detail. E.g. "There was discussion.."
On rare occasions it has been found that this approach of sending minutes out much later than the meeting is taken deliberately so that the views of the minute writer or chair person can be 'emphasised'. Such action is an abuse and it has to be said that management by deception is seldom remembered fondly and seldom engenders commitment.
What's on the Agenda?
If minutes are produced in a timely manner, a culture of swift feedback should be encouraged where errors and/or omissions are noticed. This means that the agenda item: 'Minutes of Last Meeting' can be a quick listing of already noted errors and an agreement that the minutes as amended are accurate. Too often this agenda item becomes a 5-minute reading session as attendees read the minutes for the first time.
The agenda item: 'Matters Arising' is far better labelled 'Actions'. The Chair of the meeting can then go down the minutes, picking out each item where there was an action, inviting the named person to report on progress. Each item of action then gets monitored.
There is an onus here on the people attending the meeting to prepare for it. Members of a meeting should be forewarned when a report is expected from them. They should understand beforehand the format, whether written; one side of A4 with bullet points, or verbal, or in writing as a formal detailed report. There can then be an expectancy that those reports will be completed and delivered. Those people who missed the football match or the big cliff-hanger on the TV soaps to prepare their report will not be impressed if some herbert tries to say they haven't "had time". Where this happens, unless there is a swift and public move by the chair of the meeting it can be almost guaranteed that there will be several reports not ready at the next meeting.
Project Meetings
Once the Actions are dealt with the meeting can move onto other items. If the meeting is a project meeting, the main item remaining would be 'The Plan'. This would be where each attendee would have a copy of the project plan and perhaps a more detailed personal plan, either in the form of a Gantt Chart (described in the Project Management infoKit), or a task list with expected start and end dates and showing dependencies where other tasks need to be completed before another task can commence and also where the person's own tasks are critical to the start or continuation of their own or someone else's future tasks.
It is recommended that a copy of these plans should have been sent to the Project Manager or chair of the meeting in advance, along with an indication of whether each current task will meet its targets or not. The targets may be thought of in terms of the three main variables - time, cost and quality.
It is this agenda item that will generate additional Actions for the period between the current and the next meeting. A good Project Manager will use this technique to share plans so that:
- Peer pressure creates a strong incentive to succeed
- Any clash of plans is identified. E.g. tasks requiring the same person at the same time or when a period of annual leave is due.
